


somehow to escape (reality)

by shineyma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Framework, Mentions of Canon Relationships, Post-Episode: s04e15 Self Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 14:25:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9904262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: Perhaps plugging into the framework with a moderately severe head injury wasn’t the best of ideas.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Ohmygosh, did I write something? I DID! \o/
> 
> Sorry for how long it's been--and for the lack of comment replies. Real life has gotten especially harsh lately; my dad's been in the hospital since January 31, had to have emergency open heart surgery, and keeps taking two steps back for every one step of recovery he makes. Needless to say, I haven't been in much of a writing mood. And, a lot of the time, not even an internet mood. I'm emotionally fragile; please be kind.
> 
> That said, 4x15 BLEW MY MIND and JD and I have decided that framework!fic needs to be the new rock!fic. And I had a little idea that blossomed into 3,000+ words of...well, this. So, just in case you missed the tag: **SPOILERS** for episode **4x15: Self Control**.
> 
> Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!

Jemma’s head hurts.

It occurs to her—rather belatedly—that perhaps plugging into the framework with a moderately severe head injury wasn’t the best of ideas. But it’s far too late to worry about that; the risk is just one more reason not to delay. She needs to rendezvous with Daisy, find the others, and get them all out of here as quickly as possible.

If only her head didn’t hurt so awfully.

“Jem? Jemma? _Shit_.” There are hands on her shoulders—cupping her face—checking her pulse—smoothing worriedly over her hair. All the same hands, she thinks, but it’s hard to be sure. “Sweetheart? Can you hear me?”

Did he just call her _sweetheart_?

This isn’t Fitz. (Some part of her, tiny and frightened and trying so hard to forget the feel of blood between her fingers and a hand around her throat, is almost relieved.) But who is it? The voice is familiar, and yet…

“Get me a medic,” he snaps, and she cringes away as the volume of it spikes the pounding in her head. “Hey, no, don’t move. I’m right here; you’re okay.”

That voice…

Reflex has her squeezing her eyes shut as soon as she’s opened them (she’s on the floor—another belated realization—and the lights above her are far, far too bright for her aching head), but she has time enough to recognize the man hovering worriedly over her.

Ward.

His hands are on her face again. She makes a feeble attempt at slapping them away, but he apparently misinterprets her aborted gesture; he catches and holds her hand, kisses the back of it, and then laces their fingers.

“You’re okay,” he says again, pressing the words into her knuckles as if to seal them into her skin.

It’s disturbing.

Jemma wants desperately to pull away from him, but the slightest attempt at movement sends new waves of pain flooding through her. Her thigh is throbbing where Fitz— _not_ Fitz—stabbed her, and no matter how gently Ward cradles her hand, her wrist twinges with every touch.

She’s beginning to think plugging into the framework was a _terrible_ plan.

A door slams open, followed by the sound of running.

“Sir! What happened?”

There are hands on her again—different ones this time, clinical and cool where Ward’s were frantic. One pulls at her eyelid, exposing her to the harsh glare of a penlight, and her reflexive flinch is painful enough to turn her stomach.

“I don’t know,” Ward is saying. His voice comes from farther away than it did before, though he hasn’t yet released her hand. “I came in and she was on the floor.”

That seems significant somehow, but she can’t—she can’t think.

“Dr. Ward?” A gloved hand turns her face to the side; she dares to crack one eye open and finds a concerned-looking stranger kneeling beside her. “Dr. Ward, can you hear me?” Is he talking to her? Is he calling _her_ Ward? “Can you tell me what happened?”

Her head hurts. Ward is still holding her hand. She doesn’t want him.

“Fitz,” she manages, and even she couldn’t say whether it’s an answer or a plea.

Either way, it only seems to confuse the stranger. “What fits?”

Ward’s hand spasms around hers.

“Sir?” the stranger asks.

“Get her to the infirmary,” Ward orders, finally releasing her. “I need to check something.”

Without the comfort of touch (no matter how hateful the source), it’s harder to focus. She reaches for—something, someone, _anyone_ —and finds only blinding agony, starting in her wrist and shooting up up up to settle behind her eyes.

She cries out. The pain doubles. She knows a moment of terror, and then—

—nothing.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jemma wakes in an unfamiliar room.

 _Infirmary_ , she thinks, though she isn’t sure why. The closest things the Playground has to an infirmary are the containment rooms, and this certainly isn’t one of those.

“Feeling better?”

The voice—familiar, impossible, _terrifying_ —startles her right out of the surprisingly comfortable bed she’s been tucked into. In the time it takes her to place herself in the corner (defensible, close to a window, as far as it’s possible to get from Grant bloody Ward), the events of earlier come rushing back.

With them comes the realization that she’s no longer in pain…and that she soon may be in more than before. Ward called her _sweetheart_ and the stranger—the medic, she realizes now—called her Dr. Ward, suggesting that she and Ward are (somehow, horribly and unbelievably) _together_ in the framework.

Whether actually married or just playing at such, there’s no doubt that fleeing her bed and retreating is _not_ the way the framework Ward would expect her to respond to him. The question is, what will he do about it?

The answer is slouch back in his chair and prop his feet up on her abandoned bed.

“So I was right,” he says. “You’re the real Simmons.”

Oh dear.

“The real—what are you talking about?” she asks, forcing a laugh. She injects a careful balance of amusement and confusion into her tone, but is it the _right_ balance?

Ward’s raised eyebrow suggests not.

Jemma swallows. Realistically speaking, she has no chance of fooling him. She’s an excellent liar these days, but he’s not a person, he’s a _program_. As complex and expansive as the framework is, there’s every chance that Radcliffe built some form of security protocols into it, and Jemma would fail even the most basic of tests about this world.

She’s likely in a great deal of trouble…which means there’s no point in wasting time and effort pretending not to hate this image of a man who tortured her the last time she saw him.

She inches closer to the window. “Oh, fine, you caught me. How did you know?”

“You asked for Fitz.” Ward makes a little face, as if just the name annoys him. “He never joined SHIELD in this world. My Jemma never met him.”

Jemma shudders in disgust. Hearing _any_ version of Ward—no matter how fake—refer to her as _his_ leaves her feeling distinctly unclean.

“You, on the other hand, obviously have. Not to mention the whole dramatically collapsing in the middle of the kitchen thing—not exactly subtle.” He gives her a once-over. “What happened? That mad scientist chick get a little rough while she was hooking you up? She looked like the type to have a mean streak.”

She stares. Is he…talking about Aida? But why wouldn’t he—surely the program should—

“What?” he asks. “What’s with the face?”

“Aida,” she manages. “Her name is Aida.”

“Okay,” Ward says. “Wasn’t asking, but nice to know. Is there a problem?”

Jemma opens her mouth, then immediately closes it. Her mind is whirling far too quickly to latch onto any words, any single thing to say.

He’s part of the program. Surely he should know Aida’s name— _and_ that this is Radcliffe’s show, not hers.

“What?” he asks again, impatiently. “Do you two not get along or something?” He frowns. “Is that why she didn’t reprogram this place for you? It took me _weeks_ to realize this shit wasn’t real; I didn’t notice anything wrong for the longest time. She gave me like a full life history. Kinda weird she sent you in without—what?”

Jemma’s aware that she’s gaping, but she can’t quite seem to stop.

“You don’t—you can’t possibly mean to suggest—”

“Ohhhh,” Ward says. “Oh, you don’t—” He breaks off, laughing, and swings his feet off the bed to sit forward in his chair. “You thought I was part of the program, huh?”

“You _are_ ,” she snaps.

“Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but I’m really not.”

Jemma inhales slowly, turning away to gather her composure. It’s difficult to think straight while staring Ward in the face; barely-suppressed memories of their last encounter are threatening to overwhelm her, and behind them her confrontation with the LMD version of Fitz lurks, just waiting to send her to her knees. If she lets herself start thinking about it—lets herself remember his sweet kiss to her forehead, his talk of marriage, the dispassionate way he regarded her with his hand around her throat—she’ll never stop.

Still, she takes comfort in the reminder of the imposter, as twisted as it is. He fooled her and fooled her well; without the LMD detector, she’d never have known he was fake.

But he _was_ fake, and so is Ward.

“You are,” she repeats more calmly, turning back. “You may be very convincingly programmed to believe otherwise, but the fact remains that you’re part of the framework.”

Ward rolls his eyes, though he still appears more amused than anything else. He slouches back in his seat again, elbows on the arm rests and fingers laced on his stomach.

“Okay, let’s pretend you’re right,” he says.

“I _am_.”

“If I’m part of the program,” he continues, ignoring her, “why’d I give it away? The whole point is to trick us, right?”

There’s another chair on this side of the bed and, after a long moment of thought, she drops into it. It means getting closer to Ward than she’d like, but it’s not as though an extra foot or two of distance really makes a difference. The bed is still a reassuring barrier between them; it’s enough.

“Perhaps you’re a security measure,” she says. “Programmed to trick me into revealing myself.”

“But why would you need to be revealed?” he asks. “You—wait. Hold on.” He leans forward, eyes wide with incredulity. “Simmons. Did you _sneak into the Matrix_?”

“It is not the _Matrix_ ,” she begins, annoyed, and Ward rolls his eyes.

“Whatever you wanna call it,” he says dismissively. “Did you or did you not sneak in?”

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to which Jemma should admit. It’s foolish—after all, he clearly already knows the answer, and if he didn’t, _Radcliffe_ is certainly aware she hasn’t been caught, so it’s only a matter of time before he acts against her—and yet…

She decides to deflect with a question of her own. “How is it I’m no longer in pain?”

“No idea,” Ward says easily. “One minute your vitals were out of control and my doctors were hiding in closets, trying not to be the ones to have to tell me they couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and the next you were fine.”

“ _Your_ doctors?”

“Maybe it was some kinda glitch,” he suggests. “Since you snuck in and all. Maybe you did it wrong.”

“What do you mean, _your_ doctors?” she presses.

Ward smiles, worryingly pleasant. “Didn’t I mention? I own this building.” He pauses, tips his head thoughtfully. “And the planet.”

“The—?”

“Yeah,” he chuckles. “It’s the damnedest thing. See, somewhere along the line, something went wrong. I don’t know what happened, exactly—I haven’t checked on him like I did on Fitz—but Coulson wasn’t around to keep SHIELD going after the uprising. Add to that the fact that Captain America was never around to put it down…well, let’s just say we didn’t have much of a fight on our hands when the signal went out.”

“We?” she asks numbly.

No Fitz (good for her nerves in the moment, terrible for her overall happiness). She’s with _Ward_. HYDRA _won_.

The framework is even worse than she thought.

“Ah, that’d be me and HYDRA,” he clarifies. “Yeah, I’ve been here a few years. Did the uprising thing, did the obedient soldier thing…then I realized I was in the Matrix and decided there was no way I was gonna take orders from a bunch of computer programs. So I took over.”

“And when did I come into things?” she asks, propelled by a morbid kind of curiosity.

A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. “The fake you was a little power hungry. Didn’t want a damned thing to do with me before I was head of HYDRA, but once I was? She was everywhere, all smiles and flirting.”

Well. That’s a bright spot. Climbing the ladder by dating the boss isn’t a choice she _approves_ of, necessarily (to say nothing of the fact that she’s apparently HYDRA), but it’s certainly better than any kind of actual genuine attachment to _Grant Ward_.

“And you chose to date her anyway?” she asks.

His smirk widens.

“Never mind,” she says hastily. That, she thinks, is not an avenue she wants to go down. “We’ve wandered from the point.”

“You mean the you sneaking in point?” he asks.

“ _No_ ,” she says with exaggerated patience. “The—”

“Wait.” Ward holds up a hand, eyes wandering briefly away from hers, only to snap back a moment later. “I saw May when the mad—when _Aida_ —was strapping me into this thing. Is this a rescue mission? Is that it?”

Caught off guard by the sudden question—and the mention of May, who’s been so long missing—Jemma doesn’t quite contain her reaction in time. Ward sits back with a disbelieving laugh.

“It is, isn’t it.” It’s not a question. “You plugged yourself into the fucking Matrix—and apparently did it _wrong_ —just to save May.”

“I don’t expect _you_ to understand it,” she says, not at all surprised by his tone. Of course Ward can’t sympathize; taking risks for the sake of others is solely a propensity of his cover’s. The real him—not that this _is_ the real him, she reminds herself—cares only for himself.

“Oh, I understand perfectly,” he says, and something in his eyes brings Jemma to her feet. Slowly, he follows suit. “I know all about SHIELD and your rescue missions.”

She swallows.

Thus far, Ward’s seemed mostly amused by her: questioning and mocking in equal measure, but all with a kind of good-natured air about him. Now, however, his tone’s taken a familiar and awful turn—one that opens a pit of fear in her stomach.

Real or not, Ward knows how to hurt her. And with her health in the real world already less than perfect…the slightest fraction of the attention he gave her the last time they met could easily kill her.

“Last time I got tangled up in one of SHIELD’s rescue missions, Coulson murdered me,” he says. “Time before that, May murdered Kara.”

Any other time, Jemma would defend May from that blatantly untrue accusation. Here and now, with her life so clearly at risk (and with the memory of Fitz’s blood on her hands so fresh), she doesn’t dare remind him that _he_ was the one to pull that particular trigger.

“Ward,” she says, “don’t…”

Don’t _what_? She has no idea what to say—no clue how to defuse him when she can’t even begin to guess what he’s thinking. There’s nothing in here she can use as a weapon, no way she can defend herself from a creation of the framework while she’s within it—who’s to say he can’t manipulate the very world around them?

She can’t let him kill her. She can’t leave Daisy alone in this nightmare.

“Tell me something,” he says. She stumbles back as he rounds the bed, but he darts forward to catch her wrist. “Is this a sanctioned mission?”

His hand is tight around her wrist; the memory of fighting Fitz hits her right in the gut. “I—what?”

“Does SHIELD know what you’re up to?” he asks, voice low. “Is the team watching over your body while your mind is stuck here?”

 _The_ team, no. But there is _a_ team—Elena and Piper and Davis and Prince, they’re her team now, too.

“Did you do this alone, Jemma?” he presses, pulling her closer. His hand sinks into her hair, angling her face up towards his.

For a heartbeat, she’s positive he’s about to kiss her, and in that heartbeat she finds the strength to shove him away.

“Don’t touch me,” she snaps. Provoking him may be unwise and fighting him is risky, but she’s not going to just stand about and let him do whatever he wants. She managed to kill _Fitz_ ; there’s no chance in hell she’ll surrender to _Ward_.

In any case, it doesn’t appear she needs to worry just yet; he only smiles, apparently unbothered. “Answer the question.”

“No,” she says, and then remembers just how many questions he asked. “That is, no, I didn’t do this alone. SHIELD knows what I’m doing.”

“Great,” he says brightly, turning suddenly away. “That’s that, then.”

“What do you _mean_ , that’s that?” she demands. He ignores her, heading for the door. “Ward!”

He sighs, turning back to face her. “Are you coming or what?”

Two can play at that game; she crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow at him, pointedly not moving from her spot near the window.

“Oh, for crying out—look. Sweetheart.”

“Do _not_ call me that, you—”

“Jemma,” he says over her. “You wanna save May and get out of here, right?”

“Right,” she agrees, warily. Fake Ward or no, she’s not about to admit just how many of her teammates are trapped in the framework right now. “And?”

“ _And_ I would also like to get out of here so I can start conquering the _real_ planet instead of messing around with a fake one.” He jerks his head at the door. “So I’m gonna take you to May.”

“Even if you _were_ real—which you’re not—what on earth makes you think I’d rescue _you_?” She wouldn’t just be willing to let him rot in the framework, she’d enjoy it.

Ward laughs. “I don’t need you to rescue me, sweetheart. I just need you to get SHIELD to wherever May and I are being held…and then my spies in your ranks’ll do the rest.”

“Your—”

No.

No, he doesn’t have spies. Of course he doesn’t. He’s _not real_. The real Ward died and was possessed by Hive, who then managed to get his body thoroughly destroyed. There are no HYDRA spies in SHIELD and Ward is _not_ waiting for rescue alongside the team.

…Right?

“And then I’ll kill May and Coulson,” he adds, like it’s an afterthought. “Probably Skye or Daisy or whatever she’s calling herself now. Maybe Fitz.” He gives her a charming smile. “But don’t worry; after all these years we’ve been married, I’m actually pretty fond of you—and I do owe you one. I’ll let you live.”

Jemma stares, mind bizarrely stuck on _years_ and _married_.

Still smiling, Ward opens the door. “So. Coming?”


End file.
